I first heard about ChatGPT fairly soon after it was open. It was fascinating. I tried using it in several contexts and had fun. Then my mentor asked me to attend a session by Peng Joon – an entrepreneur from Malaysia. I learnt some very interesting “how to’s” from this session:
- Give prompts. Tell Chat GPT what you want. Make your prompts as specific and detailed as possible
- Explain who you are. That helps the tool customize the output – making it suitable for your use
- Give an input as to how many lines or words you want the output to contain. You can even mention the number of pages
- Mention the purpose for which you want this result
My colleagues and I tried this out for some specific email communications, social media posts and even asked it to create short titles for some communications. While marketers and the corporate world will probably know all this already, for those in academic / non profit domains – this has been extremely useful!
How do we NOT use this too? Definitely no blind copy/pasting from the output. We read the output and fine tune it further – either by ourselves or by giving further prompts to make us feel delighted with the final output. That is a good amount of work.
Finally it is all about giving the “best prompts”. Remember the adage that we learnt when we were first exposed to using computers. This was GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out. Giving the “best prompts” to ChatGPT is a refinement of GIGO. Once we give the best prompts and get the outputs we need, the best thing we can do for ourselves is to ensure that the final document has a flavour of our own writing! And for this – if we can leave the document alone for the day, and go back to it the next day, we can add the best of our flavours!
Happy writing and communicating 🙂
